Survey points to six-hour workday.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: On Colorado - Column

"BY TURNING A LIMITED-GOVERNMENT MOVEMENT INTO an anti-tax movement, conservatism has effectively gone into business with the Big Government that it claims to oppose," Jonathan Rauch, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, wrote in the June issue of Atlantic Monthly.

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That was to be my topic this month, until I read my colleague and mentor Pat Wiesner's column on chugging a trawler through the Chesapeake Bay (page 11), when another subject suddenly seemed far more interesting: "shirking at work."

Salary.com and AOL reported in early August--truly the dog days of summer--that the average American worker admits to 2.09 hours of wasting time at work, mostly surfing the Internet (47.7 percent of the shirking), but also just socializing with other workers (23.4 percent).

The two companies' joint survey--I hope you notice who benefits from most of that shirking--said employers surveyed told researchers that 0.94 hours of shirking is actually factored into employee compensation formulas even though most personnel managers "privately" suspect average workers actually slough off 1.6 hours of their time in an eight-hour day.

"To some bosses," said Salary.com's Senior Vice President Bill Coleman, 2.09 hours is "a startling figure."

The survey estimated that employers spend $759 billion per year for the time their workers are "spacing out" (3.9 percent of the shirking) conducting personal business (6.8 percent of the shirking), "applying for other jobs" (1.3 percent of the shirking), or surfing the Internet or socializing with other workers.

Given the reputed technology-induced increase in productivity that has lifted this country out of its latest recession, that's a lot of money paid for a lot of time when those not-so-busy worker bees could have been making more money for their bosses by not wasting so much time. I'm nearly 60, so I'm proud to report one other finding of the survey. People born between 1930 and 1949 admitted to wasting only a half hour of work a day, compared with people born between 1980 and 1985 who admitted to wasting 1.95 hours on an average day.

Of course, that could mean we old folks are better liars to surveyors than the kids, but that's another consideration for a different time. However, marketing and communications workers were listed in the survey as among the top five "time-conserving" industrious workers because they admitted to wasting only 2.0 hours per day compared with the worst industry...